Secret email account dead end in search for missing Aurora boy

Mother's Yahoo account 'mostly just spam'

blood from SUV being analyzed

August 30, 2011|By Clifford Ward, Special to the Tribune

Police have uncovered a secret email account used by the mother of a missing child in the months before she killed herself, but investigators said Monday that the discovery didn't add any new pieces to the puzzle.

Aurora police say they recovered 34 emails from an account set up by Amy Fry-Pitzen, the mother of 6-year-old Timmothy Pitzen, who has not been seen since May 11, when she pulled him out of school.

They spent a night at a water park resort in Gurnee and a night in the Wisconsin Dells. Fry-Pitzen's body was found May 14 in a Rockford motel, where she slit her wrists. The child, however, has not been found.

Fry-Pitzen had "a Yahoo e-mail account that her husband has access to and another Yahoo e-mail account that was kept secret from him," according to a June search warrant recently made public.

The secret account was consistent with the input of FBI profilers who think Fry-Pitzen may have used it to help plan her actions up to several months beforehand, the affidavit said.

But it turned out to be a dead end, police said Monday.

"A lot of it was just spam," said Detective Trent Byrne, the lead investigator. "It had absolutely nothing to do with Timmy's disappearance."

Since Yahoo does not maintain records of deleted emails, there is no way of knowing whether Fry-Pitzen used the account and then erased messages, Byrne said.

In another warrant also made public last week, police revealed that they had been looking for clues by tracking Fry-Pitzen's Internet use. In the last three days of her life, Fry-Pitzen accessed the Internet via her work-issued smartphone, which has not been recovered, police said.

But that has not produced any significant leads, Byrne said.

Fry-Pitzen's employer, Mike Baum of Baum Property Management in Aurora, said Monday that Fry-Pitzen had worked as a property manager for him for about a year at the time of her death.

Earlier this month, police said they had discovered a significant amount of blood in the back seat of Fry-Pitzen's Ford SUV and that it was undergoing forensic analysis. Byrne said he hoped to get those test results in about a week.

Fry-Pitzen's mother, Alana Anderson, said Monday that Aurora police talked to her "about a week ago" about the investigation. She said she was not aware of the secret email account but knew about the smartphone.